Designing for Sports Wear: Don’t be Original

For a long time I attempted to create all of my designs from scratch, and for a long time I struggled trying to generate good designs.

The story I tell everyone is simple:
Say you need to create some fan wear for a local volleyball team and you are a gifted artist. You say, “I am locking myself in my room and will not emerge until I have created the ultimate fan wear design.” Ten hours later you emerge with a well-colored, balanced image that is ready for print. Awesome! I would say that you spent 8-9 hours too long though. Additionally, I could probably Google a couple of the assets and find something very similar to what you spent 10 hours on.

Most great fan wear designs are already out there and new ones are just variants of existing designs.

Here are my 2 simple rules to creating quality fan wear and sports designs:

You don’t need to be original.
Remember, you are trying to make something that everyone will want to wear, that people will trade their hard earned money for and fill the stands with their team colors.

Find a design that already exists and modify it.
Using google images, search for something like “volleyball design” and see what you find. If you are creating for a sport like volleyball you can also look at soccer or basketball and just swap out the text and ball. The nice thing about sports designs is that they can be slightly modified or reused for other sports entirely.

After you have selected a design “template”, you can do one of a couple things: Either design it yourself or have someone else put it together. It is easier than ever to do this work yourself. There are design studios and packages with thousands of templates ready to go; and remember, you can use a soccer template for basketball or soccer and nobody will know if you swap out the balls and change the text. If you struggle with the design aspect, it’s okay to ask for help! There are hundreds of videos online covering how to create and modify quality fan art and sports designs.

Thanks for reading and good luck on your next big game!

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